On Feb. 3, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, ruler of Dubai and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, announced on Twitter he was seeking a person under age 25 “to represent our youth, their issues and ambitions as a UAE government minister.”

A week later, Shamma Al Mazrui, a 22-year-old woman who was the UAE’s first Rhodes Scholar, was appointed Minister of State for Youth. It was part of a seismic cabinet shakeup that included creating bold new cabinet offices, such as ministers of state for Tolerance and Happiness, and restructuring old ministries (e.g., Cabinet Affairs became Cabinet Affairs and The Future).

Why should you care how an Arab sheikdom shuffles its deck chairs? Because the UAE, and in particular the city-state of Dubai, are making a bold bid to own the future. And because Dubai’s economic evolution — from pearl-diving to oil wells and now tourism, trade and technology — is close to the path Canada must tread (if you swap out pearls for beaver pelts).

Dubai’s ambitions were on full display last week as the city hosted its fourth annual World Government Summit, a three-day conference committed to improving governments’ abilities to manage issues such as terrorism, unemployment, aging and climate change. Technology czars from MIT, Salesforce, Siemens, Bitcoin and HyperLoop and award-winning entrepreneurs rubbed elbows with world leaders, including president of Rwanda, prime minister of Egypt, ex-presidents from Mexico and France, and cabinet ministers from Costa Rica to Scotland; high-level diplomats from the United Nations, the OECD and the World Bank. Even U.S. President Barack Obama turned up, if only via a live video address.

Attending the conference (full disclosure: the summit picked up the travel costs), I didn’t really know what to expect. But I encountered three major surprises:

World leaders are running out of ideas. Societies face so many challenges at once — climate, health care, economic stagnation, security, service delivery — that no one knows what to do. So they’re putting their trust in a lucky rabbit’s foot: innovation. Swiss economist Klaus Schwab, the 77-year-old founder and CEO of the World Economic Forum, opened the summit by saying that countries will no longer be classified as developed and less developed economies. Instead,”they will be divided into innovative and non-innovative ones.”

Schwab contends that the multiple simultaneous advances of the Internet of Things, mobile, medicine, materials, artificial intelligence, and even drones are creating the fourth Industrial Revolution. He says it will transform people’s lives just as did the three previous ones — steam, electricity and computers. Given such volatility, Schwab had no solutions to offer than to say that humanity must tackle these challenges using all our senses: “Brains, soul, heart, and nerves.”

Takeaway for entrepreneurs: Every intractable problem represents a fountain of new opportunities. As governments share best practices in summits like this, the rewards multiply for innovators with better solutions. Keep pushing the public sector to reduce the barriers to adopting innovation: they need you as much as you need them.

The government can’t direct the future or create jobs. Summit politicians were unusually frank about this. Leaders from Costa Rica to Sweden to Australia talked about reducing bureaucracy and promoting entrepreneurship. Politicians are recognizing that their first job is to support entrepreneurs. Their second job is to use their education, culture and technology levers to make more of them.

Takeaway for entrepreneurs: When even Sweden is promoting the private sector, you know Canada has to step up its game. Entrepreneurship development should not be an afterthought for governments, but Priority 1. This is a golden time for business associations to propose new policies to help governments upgrade and unleash Canadians’ business savvy.

Jasper Juinen/Bloomberg

Dubai and its rulers are serious about owning the future. With two high-density development cores 20 kilometres apart, Dubai boasts 20 of the world’s 100 tallest buildings, including the tallest, the Burj Khalifa, at 828 metres. In his summit talk, U.S. astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said Dubai’s skyline reminded him of the city-of-the-future models he’d seen as a six-year-old at the New York World’s Fair. Tyson credits that fair with sparking his interest in science and discovery — and laments that U.S. industry and architecture never followed up. “Dubai,” he said, “is the city of the future I’ve been looking for. The city we in the U.S. never built.”

Keep in mind Dubai is not a petroleum power; oil represents only four per cent of government finances. So it’s a gamble for Dubai to fund world-class technology projects — albeit a smart one.

Picture this: A week ago a suburb named Dubai Internet City hosted its second annual “Drones for Good” competition for new drone technology. The three-day event received 1,000 entries from 165 countries by offering US$1.2 million in prize money. The winner, from Michigan’s Oakland University, was the LoonCopter, which can fly, skim along water, or dive below the surface. At the same time, Dubai presented the UAE AI & Robotics Award for Good, to encourage development of artificial intelligence to solve nagging problems in health, education and social services.

Politicians are recognizing that their first job is to support entrepreneurs. Their second job is to use their education, culture and technology levers to make more of them

Then there’s Dubai Science park, a complete neighbourhood where scientists can live, work and play; Dubai’s new commitment to increase its renewable-energy target to 15 per cent of total energy consumption by 2030 (a tall order in a city that runs on air conditioning); a partnership that brought IBM’s Watson super-computing power to the Middle East; the Museum of the Future now being developed in Dubai; and the UAE Mars mission scheduled to launch in 2020.

One government spokesman, Dr. Thani Al Zeyoudi, a 32-year-old PhD who had just been appointed the UAE’s Minister for Climate Change and Environment, told me that from IT to green to global governance, Dubai is carrying out Sheikh Mohammed’s directive to explore all avenues to make life better. He says the future isn’t about robots or office towers, but service: “We have to take our service to a higher level.”

Rick Spence is a writer, consultant and speaker specializing in entrepreneurship.